IGF 2021 WS #147
AI: Human traditional Ethics vs new digital Ethics

Organizer 1: Tatiana Kurbatova, CGITC

Speaker 1: Maxim Fedorov, Technical Community, Eastern European Group
Speaker 2: Athina Karatzogianni, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 3: Desmond Higham, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 4: Peter Grindrod, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

Moderator

Yury Tsvetkov, Technical Community, Eastern European Group

Online Moderator

Yury Tsvetkov, Technical Community, Eastern European Group

Rapporteur

Yury Tsvetkov, Technical Community, Eastern European Group

Format

Round Table - Circle - 90 Min

Policy Question(s)

Economic and social inclusion and sustainable development: What is the relationship between digital policy and development and the established international frameworks for social and economic inclusion set out in the Sustainable Development Goals and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in treaties such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Conventions on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, on the Rights of the Child, and on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities? How do policy makers and other stakeholders effectively connect these global instruments and interpretations to national contexts?
Digital policy and human rights frameworks: What is the relationship between digital policy and development and the established international frameworks for civil and political rights as set out in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and further interpretation of these in the online context provided by various resolutions of the Human Rights Council? How do policy makers and other stakeholders effectively connect these global instruments and interpretations to national contexts? What is the role of different local, national, regional and international stakeholders in achieving digital inclusion that meets the requirements of users in all communities?

The main challenge to be addressed in this workshop is to find out how difficult to reach international consensus and points of convergence on ethical issues in the field of AI. Ethical usage of AI often equals to “safe /for people/ usage of AI”. The second challenge is to combine different approaches on understanding of what a safe AI system is, including the machine learning methods involved and data integrity. This can only be achieved by an interdisciplinary approach achieved by gathering expert knowledge from various fields, not necessarily directly related to AI, especially when it comes to ethical and global aspects of AI. This workshop also seeks to raise technical soundness of measures for trustworthy AI.

SDGs

4. Quality Education
5. Gender Equality
8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
11. Sustainable Cities and Communities


Targets: AI usage is essential for global economy,gender equality, sustainable development and quality education, as AI forms the basement for modern proactive public services and for moderation of people’s behavior in Internet. From governmental point of view AI affects all spheres of Internet governance at national and international levels. Any form of AI regulation incl. universal ethical principles in a number of international documents has a deep impact on human rights and future of Internet.

Description:

AI based software and technical solutions occupy ever more areas of human economy. The spread of AI multiplies the risks to every single user and the society, especially to human rights in digital environment and ethical aspects of AI usage. The latter are associated with privacy, security, safety, reliability, explainability, accountability etc.
1. Reaching common understanding of ethical principles in a digital world, based on humankind experience within traditional ethical norms is a hot topic for discussion these days among experts and politicians. Most of the involved parties agree that simple transfer of ethical principles from analogue to digital environment might not work as it should. The workshop is aimed to find a common ground for possible scenarios of reflection of human ethics to the new digital world, incl. issues related to the formation of ethical norms and regulations for actors in the field of AI at all stages of the life cycle of AI systems.

2. Development of trustworthy AI aimed to reduce risks and to gain peoples trust cannot be accomplished without maintaining effective measures to mitigate the full spectrum of threats, challenges and the said risks. The recent developments within ISO, CoE have set up the goal of achieving frameworks for formally verified AI systems. Following these trends, the current workshop is dedicated to bringing awareness to the trustworthiness matters of modern AI systems. The explainability aspect here not only refers to the transparency of algorithms to the end-users but, most importantly, to open data and their availability and description to the public. Special attention is paid to dynamic risks, which arise in an autonomous application, as well as ethical aspects of AI.

Expected Outcomes

1. The expected result is that the analysis of expert opinions will be an additional step in understanding the place and role of ethics in process of development of AI systems and their regulation.
2. The outcomes of talks and discussions within the workshop could be submitted in the form of a whitepaper on ethics of safe usage of AI systems.

TBC. It will depend on the format due to the current pandemic restrictions - online or hybrid.

Online Participation



Usage of IGF Official Tool.